26.3. Mapping Shares to Drive Letters: All VersionsIf you access network shares on a regular basis, you may want to consider another access technique, called mapping shares . Using this trick, you can assign a letter to a particular shared disk or folder on the network. Just as your hard drive is called C: and your floppy drive is A:, you can give your Family Stuff folder the letter F: and the backup drive in the kitchen the letter J:. Doing so confers several benefits. First, these disks and folders now appear directly in the Computer window. Getting to them this way can be faster than navigating to the Network window. Second, when you choose File Open from within one of your applications, youll be able to jump directly to a particular shared folder instead of having to double-click, ever deeper, through the icons in the Open File dialog box. You can also use the mapped drive letter in pathnames anywhere you would use a path on a local drive, such as the Run dialog box, a File Save As dialog box, or the command line. To map a drive letter to a disk or folder, open any folder or disk window. Then:
From now on (depending on your setting in step 4), that shared disk or folder shows up in your Navigation pane along with the disks that are actually in your PC, as shown at bottom in Figure 26-8. Tip: If you see a red X on one of these mapped icons, it means that the PC on which one of the shared folders or disks resides is either off the network or turned off completely. |